


You Don't Want to Get This Way

by JK Ashavah (ashavah)



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Backstory, Careers (Hunger Games), Careers Have Issues, Character Study, District 4, Finnick Odair-Centric, Forced Prostitution, Gen, Implied/Referenced Underage Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Mentors, Pre-Canon, Underage Drinking, Victors, see tags for warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-13 00:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3360611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashavah/pseuds/JK%20Ashavah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you're a Career, winning the Games means a life spent training other kids to be like you. Finnick Odair has a problem with that, but he doesn't have a good way out. He takes a bad one instead. Fortunately, there's someone there to help steer him straight.</p><p>Please see tags for content warnings!</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Don't Want to Get This Way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ashen_key](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashen_key/gifts).
  * Inspired by [And she does not know which way to steer](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3356555) by [ashen_key](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashen_key/pseuds/ashen_key). 



> Title from Lana del Rey's _Carmen_ :
> 
>  _She says, "You don't want to be like me / Don't wanna see all the things I've seen / I'm dying, I'm dying" / She says, "You don't want to get this way / Famous and dumb at an early age."_
> 
> Thanks to [ashen_key](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ashen_key/pseuds/ashen_key), the roleplay Annie to my Finnick, and my partner in canon analysis and going " _Careers_ , man!"
> 
> Obviously, I own none of it, and am just having fun with these beautiful screwups.

[ After part ii. of [And she does not know which way to steer](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3356555) by [ashen_key](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ashen_key/pseuds/ashen_key) ]

 

"I don't need you to tell me how to look after my victor, Naia Barros," Mags says sharply into the telephone in her study. "I was mentoring tributes before you were born."

It's Finnick, of course.

It's always Finnick, lately. Finnick making some news story doing something that starts the gossips back here talking and sets them off for weeks. Finnick staying in the Capitol long after many of the other victors have returned home from the Games. Finnick, always seen at clubs and parties and wherever the spotlight and the cameras are.

Finnick, who Librae Ogilvy had told Naia Barros was seen shooting morphling with a handsome stylist twice his age in the Capitol last week. Who'd been spotted on the beach last night with a full bottle of liquor.

Finnick, who Naia had called to complain hadn't shown up at training this morning to help the prospective tributes with their spearfighting, though that was something he'd excelled at himself, and that he'd used in the arena. He'd killed tributes that way, hiding in the long grass of the arena, setting traps with the nets he'd found in the Cornucopia, lying in cover by one of the main water sources until his enemies approached to refill their canteens, and then striking.

District 3 and District 9 had lost tributes to Finnick's spears. He has a great deal he could teach, but Mags suspects lack of faith in his abilities is not his issue.

"I don't know why you keep trying with that boy," Naia tells her. "He's no help. He can't see past his ego long enough to think about anyone else."

"That boy has a better heart than you, Naia Barros. And if you're done insulting him, I have things to do."

"Say that again when the Capitol has swallowed him."

Mags knows that it already has. She knows why Finnick was getting high with a rich and famous man in a Capitol club, why he'd stayed in the Capitol after the Games, and it makes her sick. Finnick had been a bright boy, beautiful but so much more than that. Smart, cocky, bold, quick to learn, to adapt, a ruthless fighter but under it, possessed of a genuine good nature. She'd liked him from the start, even before she'd guided him through his interview and his training, helping him to win the adulation of the Capitol crowds.

That had won him the sponsors to play out the Games to his advantage, but she'd had no idea what it would cost him afterwards, and that cost has long been threatening to crush the brightness from his heart.

With what Finnick's been through? The Games, the price of victory for him, the deaths of his parents so soon after his victory? She'll give him time to sort himself through his issues. She's seen some of the darkness behind those stunning green eyes of his. But this is too far.

Mags picks up her cane, though she only occasionally needs it to walk, and makes her way across the Victors' Village to Finnick's house. There's no answer when she knocks, so she lets herself in, with the key Finnick had given her years ago.

The house is silent as she enters, her eyes narrowed.

He's in the kitchen, and when she sees him, Mags stares. Had he really slid this far without her realizing?

He's seated at the table, slumped over and sprawled across its surface, sand in his hair and on his clothes, and a very empty bottle by his hand.

He's also out cold.

She knows better than to approach him and try to shake him awake. She knows the memories of his Games make him wake with a lightning-fast strike if someone sneaks up on him, and she knows that moment of blind panic on awakening herself, though her Games were many decades ago.

He needs -- and most likely deserves -- a less gentle awakening.

The bucket of water she throws over his head is cold, and it wakes him with a start and, as she'd expected, an instinctive and violent movement that makes her glad she'd thrown the water from a few feet away.

He stinks of rum.

"What do you think you're doing, Finnick Odair?"

He's still turning, his dark-smudged eyes wild, trying to see his assailant, but at her voice, his posture slumps and he falls back into his chair, one leg bent and one sticking out straight under the table. His head lolls onto the chair back.

"I am ... staying home from training today."

He manages not to slur the words, quite a feat, but only by over-enunciating them.

"Given that it's high noon and you're dead drunk, that's probably a good thing." The sun was definitely not over the yardarm when he started drinking.

He lifts half-lidded eyes to her, but she's seen that trick of his too many times to buy it, so she narrows her own eyes. She shakes her head at him and settles down in a chair near his.

"What's going on, Finnick?" she asks, softly. "I just had Naia Barros on the telephone complaining about you."

There's a long, silent moment in which Finnick just stares at her.

"I can't do it, Mags." His head drops down to rest on one arm on the table. His voice is muffled, but she can still hear it. "Those stupid _kids_. They think they're gonna win and it'll all be money and fame and parties, and they look at me and they think it more. So they're just gonna go and volunteer, and if they don't get killed, they'll end up like me. And they _want_ to."

Finnick had been like that once. So young, so bright, so brave and bold, thinking he could take on the arena and the rest of Panem and win, and that when he'd won, he'd have set his family up for life. The perfect dream the Capitol sells of what winning the Games means.

Now his parents are dead, and Finnick blames himself for their deaths. And his beauty has turned into a darkness he could never have imagined. Mags herself had heard rumors about what happens to the best-looking victors, but nothing more, hadn't known whether or not to believe it until the time Finnick had come to her, late one night, and whispered the secret that had killed his parents.

"They don't know," he continues, "and nobody's going to tell them, because they're scared. And someone has to go anyway. May as well be one of them, right? That's what people say. Because they're trained. They've got a chance of winning." 

The bitterness in his voice bites.

"I just can't see the way they look at me."

His face had been all over the television last week, in the Capitol, and plenty of people in District 4 had admired him, taken pride in their victor. Wished for another.

"Six different people last week, Mags," he whispers to the table. "And I wanted to kill them all."

She knows who and what he means.

"I know," she says, and she runs a hand over his hair.

Despite being a victor, she's no longer a violent woman. But the people who put that despair in Finnick's voice nearly drive her to wish the same. He could kill them, if he tried. If he weren't too afraid to defend himself. But he lives in fear, now, always, and there's nothing she can do to protect him from them. From President Snow. From knowing that if he slips, more people he cares for will die.

Like Mags.

"Drinking yourself into a stupor won't make it easier, Finnick. And one thing that will only make it worse is morphling."

His head jerks up, like he's about to deny it, but her eyes narrow.

"You were seen last week, don't pretend. You're going to destroy yourself if you keep this up, Finnick, and that's no answer. You have to keep fighting. Remember who you really are. You're not this."

His head drops again. She's fairly sure the words he mutters into his arms are, "how would I know?"

He stops speaking after that, though she sits by his side a while longer, until he moans and shifts, and she grabs at his shirt to drag him into the bathroom and turn the shower on him. He yelps, but he returns to alertness long enough for her to leave him to shower and change before she puts him to bed to sleep the rest of the bottle off.

She sees no more drunkenness from him for several weeks, and ... it's a start.


End file.
